Roland Martin pretends to be a journalist. But what does a guy do when the one percent won’t pay for an informed public? Roland is a hustla for hire, and he’s found a dependable set of clients. Roland is all about blackening up and selling us the destruction and privatization of public schools, which is what both elite Democrats and Republicans want. Journalists tell the truth without fear or favor. Hustlas do what they’re paid to do, and the charter school sugar daddies pay well.

Betsy DeVos barely won confirmation as the next secretary of education, so dreadful is the performance of the charter schools she promotes in Michigan. But the educational atrocities of the DeVos schools are inseparable from the larger war against public education. Barack Obama doubled charter school enrollment, and Cory Booker, who hopes to be president, is a fanatical advocate of private school vouchers. Trump and Devos aren’t the only villains.

Any “resistance” to Trump that allies itself with Democrats, is futile. The Democrats are “unprincipled scoundrels” who “have no desire to move away from their corporate sugar daddies.” If the same people that now declare themselves foes of Trumpism “spend time wondering if they should back Cory ‘the hooker’ Booker or Elizabeth Warren in 2020, or ponder who should run the Democratic National Committee, they aren’t resisting anything.”

If you think President Trump’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, is a raving right-winger, check out his mother. Ann Gorsuch’s administration of the Reagan era EPA was “marked by sharp budget cuts, in-fighting with career civil servants, a cozy relationship with corporate polluters, and lack of environmental enforcement,” paving the way for future crises, including the lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan.

Contradictions abound in the mass protests against Donald Trump’s whirlwind of proclamations. While Trump’s executive order banning many Muslims should be categorically rejected, we must also reject “the Democratic and Republican parties for creating the conditions that led to it.” Trump has stripped the socially acceptable garments from U.S. empire. But, “a naked empire remains a dangerous empire” — and only masses of people can defeat it.

U.S. incarceration levels remain so high because this country hands down longer sentences than anyplace else in the world. People sentenced to life serve twice as much time behind bars as they did in the 1980s. The Trump administration, not give to the token gestures of his predecessors, is not expected to change this.

Not My President? How About Not My System?
by our friends at ThisIsHell.com
BAR managing editor Bruce Dixon asks whether, when we say “not my president” are we just hollering for Hillary, or maybe Cory Booker? Shouldn’t we be saying tht none of them have ever been our president? Trump is no more illegitimate than the last half dozen or 3 dozen presidents. Don’t we need to replace a system, not personalities and parties?

Before she decided to take part in the Women’s March on the nation’s capital, the author was “conflicted” about the project. Like others, she wondered “where were all of these white people while our people are being killed in the streets, jobless, homeless, over incarcerated, under educated?” Garza concluded that, “If our movement is not serious about building power, then we are just engaged in a futile exercise of who can be the most radical.”

The Trump phenomenon points to a civilizational shift; namely, the slow, painful demise of the Western Empire. If this shift breaks down the European Union, dismantles NATO, weakens the Empire’s financial control over the global South, and opens a space for a new moral and political order to emerge, then it is an opportunity all revolutionary forces must seize.

Canadians demonstrated in Ontario, to expressed both their revulsion to the private terror of the man that murdered six Muslims in Quebec City and their opposition to Canada’s complicity in U.S. state terror against the Muslim world. These U.S.-led wars are designed to steal targeted nations’ “energy resources and to further encircle those countries that the U.S. deems its competitors on the global chessboard, including Russia, China, and Iran.”

“Many who voted for Hillary Clinton, and who are now protesting, would have never protested her actual imperialist legacy, had she been elected.” The same goes for Obama supporters. Democrats and Republicans are joined in their subservience to corporate masters, and to imperialist wars. “It is imperative that the connections between Democrats and Republicans be made, especially regarding foreign policy.